Snowshoes And Cold Butts

Today is the last day of January for 2011, which means that I will never see January 2011 again.  Yippee!  Losing January means that spring is just that much closer.  Apparently February is winter's last kick at the can around these here parts, which means that four or five weeks from now we should be through the worst of it.  I am so looking forward to that.  I am not a fan of winter.  Call me a disloyal Canuck if you want but I hate all things winter, hockey being right at the top of the list.  But I digress.  Of course when spring is sprung then the mud starts, but I can put up with mud if it means that winter is behind us.  What I am really looking forward to is the longer days of sunshine.  I love sunshine.  Right now I am imagining getting up in the morning to the sound of birds chirping away, loons calling on the lake as the sun rises over the trees while I sit on the deck and drink my pretend coffee (tea).  Ah, paradise.

Today we went snowshoeing in the bush looking for pins of demarcation.  Those are the all important pegs which mark our territory from the enemy's (the neighbour's). We (and when I say we, I really mean my husband because I personally could have gone for years without knowing exactly where they were) had found most of the survey pins during the fall months, but one section of our land has been infected by swamp land on the south east side and neither my hubby nor I were inclined to slog through the mess while it was in the liquid state. Being soaked to the skivvies would have been bad enough but it was the mosquitoes that neither of us were interested in battling with.  I know, you can say it, wusses.  So today there were no mosquitoes it was all snowshoeing and cold asses from the nor'easter blowing down on us. 

So being almost like boy scouts in the preparedness department, along with matches, a dog, hats, gloves and neck warmers we took two different types of tracking devices.  I being slightly old fashioned took a low tech device called a compass, the hubby took the GPS.  Strangely enough the compass kept going even after the batteries gave out on the GPS.  We managed to find a pile of the old trail blazes so we added our own pretty neon pink surveyor's tape. The dog added some poop.  So now whenever we need to patrol the borders we can slog through the bush knowing exactly where we are at all times so we never accidentally set foot on enemy ground.  Of course that won't protect us from those doggy land mines, but hey, you can't have everything.    Because of our diligent work today we will always know where that line of death lies (unless of course there is a lot of beaver activity while we have our backs turned), and believe me, as a long time Canadian I know you can never trust a beaver.  That's one of the first things they teach us in kindergarten up here in the great white north.

Above is a picture of the poopinator.